How do I read binary files?

Although text files are often meant for humans to read, they are also commonly used for data storage by computer programs. Text files have some advantages even for data storage because they avoid certain problems with binary files, such as endianness, padding bytes, or differences in the number of bytes in a machine word. Further, when data corruption occurs in a file used for data storage, it is far easier for a human to fix if it is a text file. As a bonus, it may be easier for the program to recover from the error, because text files are pretty verbose, while binary files are usually compact (it's said that text files have a low entropy rate). Damaging an amount of a text file destroys little information; damaging the same amount of a binary file destroys more information.